Tumblr wants more of your GIFs, comes up with a tool so you can easily create them

By Andy Boxall November 18, 2015

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Tumblr, the home of endless reblogged GIFs, has come up with a way to break out of the share/reshare cycle that exists with the animated clips on its site — provide a way for people to easily make their own. The result is a Tumblr produced tool called GIF Maker that’s built into the standard Tumblr mobile app.

GIFs are fun, but traditionally a bit of a pain to produce. That’s changed recently, with the emergence of apps such as Giphy Cam, which Tumblr will take on here. The new GIF Maker mode is clever, because it searches the photo library on your iPhone to find videos and burst mode photos that can be quickly animated in a short clip.

There are a few editing tools to make the GIFs unique. It’s easy to crop the image, zoom in, loop the footage, add a ‘rebound’ effect to make it run backwards after getting to the end, plus the chance to speed up or slow down the footage. Tumblr says people may be surprised by the amount of images and videos stored on their devices that can be turned into GIFs already, but the app will look at any suitable content in the Camera Roll, so if you’ve grabbed some video or images from elsewhere that’ll work, it’ll let you play with them too.

However, Tumblr is already full of meme-style GIFs, and those created from TV and film. GIF Maker is a way to introduce more personal, individual GIFs. It’s working too, if the amount of homemade GIFs showing up using the #Made With Tumblr hashtag is anything to go by. Oh, and this is Tumblr, so there’s some NSFW GIFs in that line-up, so careful where you’re viewing.

At the moment, Tumblr’s GIF Maker is only available on the iPhone, but an Android update is promised for the near future.

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Andy is a Senior Writer at Digital Trends, where he concentrates on mobile technology, a subject he has written about for…

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